Languages – architecture – journalism?

In October 1990, a young British man arrived in Czechoslovakia to be a technical assistant at the Czech Technical University for six months. After 27 years, this gentleman named David Vaughan lives in Prague with his wife and two children, and is opened to give me an interview about his unpredictable course of life.

“The time was cheerful, everything was feasible,“ said the winsome journalist, who at first did not intend to be a journalist at all, in answer to my question why he settled down in Czechoslovakia.

David Vaughanstudied at Oxford – German and French at first, then architecture. After six months in Czechoslovakia, he received his first journalist job – creating a series about Prague architecture for the English Service of Radio Prague. “It is strange because radio is the direct opposite of architecture – architecture is tangible, but radio waves are transient – first they are here and then they have gone. But when the job turned up in radio, I decided to take it up.“

In 1996, David was offered an attractive job as a BBC freelance correspondent in Prague to cover events of central Europe, which after six years was not attractive to him anymore. “I was never by nature a news journalist.”

So he was pleased to return to Radio Prague as an editor-in-chief for the next eight years.

David Vaughan’s main areas of interest are Czech books and Czech history. For the past sixteen years, he has been passionately producing a radio program called Czech books.

He has even authored two books himself – “Bitva o vlny/ Battle for the Airwaves” about the role of radio before WW2 and “Slyšte můj hlas/ Hear My Voice”, which depicts events leading to signing of the Munich Treaty in 1938. The latter documentary novel was awarded the Czech Books readers´ prize in 2015.

David´s enthusiasm is now a great example for his students at Anglo-American University in Prague, where he lectures. He teaches them that“the most essential asset of a good journalist is their passion, because without passion, there is no enriching journalism”.